06 January 2008

This site has the highest cool factor I've seen in ages. Offering a dashboard to an aggregate of your whole online "social", "2.0" existence.I particularly like the editable automated "me" search feature, enabling users to weed out "ugly" search results - a great way to manage your online reputation.They're fully interoperable with some of the most relevant other social media. Their API is super open, and of course they support data portability.

As they've put it in small prints, for geeks:"Lifestrea.ms uses RSS, Atom feeds, APIs and proprietary methods to aggregate information from all the web apps you use. It brings everything together in a full Ajax Dashboard, which updates automatically your incoming stream of news by putting new posts on the top. As you can add any other RSS or Atom feed too and even import OPML files, you can and should also use it as a newsreader. With lifestrea.ms as a newsreader you can comment on posts and forward them to friends in your social network to start a threaded discussion. You can also find likeminded people as you can see who's reading the same feeds. If you keep it secret that you're reading a feed, you can at least annotate and tag it. If you read this feed publicly, you can even pingback and trackback on posts automatically. You can also create your own content from inside your dashboard, by uploading audio, video and image files and writing status updates and blog posts. Files are scanned for meta information (e.g. for mp3s: artist, album title, release date) which is added automatically too. If you've registered with Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, Pownce, Del.icio.us, Magnolia you can even push your content up there in parallel in one step. For every single piece of content you can decide whom to share with: with nobody, with a single person, with the whole world or with one of your networks. lifestrea.ms philosophy is that every man has more than one personality and therefore more than one profile. We've clustered these profiles into friends, family, local, professional and romantic which sticks to the XFN standard. You can have different profile data tied to each of these virtual personas and you have full control over what data is public and, if it's not public, who can see it. People you've invited to your networks will find your lifestream on your public profile page which you can use as an OpenID. This means you have 5 public OpenIDs plus a secret one. The OpenIDs are auto-generated from your basic username, but you can change them once to whatever you like. Your profile page groups your lifestream into the different media types but also holds machine readable data. This means your lifestream is also available as an RSS feed, your friends as XFN and Microformat tags and your profile data as an hCard. As lifestrea.ms stores information about what you read, what you post and what you communicate, we are able to enhance this data semantically and generate a stream of attention data for each of your profiles from this. That way you have a continuously updated APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) file on each of your profile pages. By using all these open standards you as a user have full control over your data and you as a developer can build new applications on top of this. Lifestrea.ms even enables users for the first time to practice the vision of a Portable Social Network and the Open Social Graph (not to be compared with the widget-only Google OpenSocial). But we don't calculate your APML only for external purposes. It's also in heavy use inside your dashboard. From your attention data we calculate what newsfeeds have a high priority for you, what new topics could be of interest for you and what people you should get to know, 'cause they are heading for the same things. We suggest feeds, topics and people (anonymously) to you as soon as we find them in your - you guessed it - live dashboard. Give it a try today and invite all your friends, family members and colleagues - it's effortless as lifestrea.ms supports importing your contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo and many other online email providers. Lifestrea.ms supports even sending invitations to your friends on all your favorite networks like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster and Orkut. We appreciate your feedback!"If you want an invitation, just drop me a line.

COLOFON

This is a stupid simple link bank, referring to everything that just might be a symptom of Web 2.0. I'm not dogmatic. Any sign of: collective intelligence / wisdom of crowds, collaboration / sharing, reviewing / ranking / rating, community / social software, enabling / empowering users is good enough for a listing.